Chapter I: Front Matter

ESSAYS AND
SOLILOQUIES

_BORZOI TRANSLATIONS SPRING 1925_

_FROM THE SPANISH_
FIGURES OF THE PASSION OF OUR LORD
BY GABRIEL MIRO
_Translated by C. J. Hogarth_

_FROM THE FRENCH_
THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL
BY ABEL CHEVALLEY
_Translated by Ben Ray Redman_

_FROM THE GERMAN_
DEATH IN VENICE
BY THOMAS MANN
_Translated by Kenneth Burke_

_FROM THE RUSSIAN_
THE CLOCK
BY ALEKSEI REMIZOV
_Translated by John Cournos_

_TALES OF THE WILDERNESS_
BY BORIS PILNIAK
_Translated by F. O’Dempsey_

_FROM THE NORWEGIAN_
SEGELFOSS TOWN
BY KNUT HAMSUN
_Translated by J. S. Scott_

_FROM THE POLISH_
THE PEASANTS
BY LADISLAS REYMONT
_Translated by Michael H. Dziewicki_

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH

NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLAND
AND FURNISHED BY W.F. ETHERINGTON & CO.,
NEW YORK.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_Erratum_

The two paragraphs on pages 100-101 beginning:

In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says

and:

Readers of Don Quixote will recall

are a continuation of the footnote on page 99.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my native country.

Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company. He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an anthology or _florilegium_ of my shorter articles and extracts from my more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.

I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost impossible is that the author himself should make the selection. It is not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part of our public.

In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an advertisement.

Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked: “What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style. Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not always give birth to rhythm.

In selecting these pieces--torsos, arms and heads of statuary--my friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this way he has best served the public that seeks to know me--me, the man, and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy. And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare. And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.

To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work, and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation, the Universe.

* * * * *

Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of making a new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.

Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion--now I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay, it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera. While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.

There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful of earth without a Spanish grave--

_No hay un puñado de tierra_
_Sin una tumba española,_

and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven without a nest of Spanish thought.

Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.

* * * * *

And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling sea which smiles, with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.

Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is the life of my life.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.

_Fuerteventura,

June 6, 1924._

CONTENTS

_Author’s Preface_ xii

_Introduction_ 3

_The Spirit of Castile_ 30

_Spanish Individualism_ 38

_Some Arbitrary Reflections upon Europeanization_ 52

_The Spanish Christ_ 76

_The Sepulchre of Don Quixote_ 82

_The Helmet of Mambrino_ 99

_Don Quixote’s Niece_ 108

_The Religion of Quixotism_ 113

_Large and Small Towns_ 125

_To My Readers_ 133

_Soliloquies_ 142

_My Religion_ 154

_Solitude_ 163

_Intellectuality and Spirituality_ 170

_The Materialism of the Masses_ 190

_The Man of Flesh and Bone_ 195

_The Problem of Immortality_ 205

_Creative Faith_ 217

_The Song of the Eternal Waters_ 226

_The Tower of Monterrey_ 233

_Appendix_ 241

_Bibliography_ 243

ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES